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[ by Charles Cameron -- cross-posted from Sembl ]
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You don’t have to be playing a Sembl or Hipbone game to make a great Sembl move — you just have to see a rich semblance between two concepts in (previously) widely separated fields of thought. Thus Pierre Deligne of Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, who won the Abel Prize in mathematics this year, did so by working on a rich Sembl-style insight from André Weil. As Scientific American reports today:

Deligne’s most spectacular results are on the interface of two areas of mathematics: number theory and geometry. At first glance, the two subjects appear to be light-years apart. As the name suggests, number theory is the study of numbers, such as the familiar natural numbers (1, 2, 3, and so on) and fractions, or more exotic ones, such as the square root of two. Geometry, on the other hand, studies shapes, such as the sphere or the surface of a donut. But French mathematician André Weil had a penetrating insight that the two subjects are in fact closely related. In 1940, while Weil was imprisoned for refusing to serve in the army during World War II, he sent a letter to his sister Simone Weil, a noted philosopher, in which he articulated his vision of a mathematical Rosetta stone. Weil suggested that sentences written in the language of number theory could be translated into the language of geometry, and vice versa. “Nothing is more fertile than these illicit liaisons,” he wrote to his sister about the unexpected links he uncovered between the two subjects; “nothing gives more pleasure to the connoisseur.”

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While I was still a schoolboy, my favorite place to visit on vacation was the great Abbaye St. Pierre de Solesmes, celebrated for its central part in the renewal of Catholic liturgy and of the Gregorian Chant in particular. Two of my fondest memories are of the terrific bowls of coffee served in the monastic refectory at breakfast, and of my opportunity to take a class in chant under the chironomic hand of Dom Joseph Gajard, then Choirmaster at Solesmes. The liturgy and the chant were sublime.

I was an Anglican (“Episcopalian”) at the time, and just a wee bit concerned that the monks might want to convert me to the One Holy [Roman] Catholic and Apostolic version of the faith — but when I expressed my concern to one of the monks, I was reassured: they had had an earlier guest at the abbey, one Simone Weil, and she too had been unready to convert, though deeply moved by the liturgy…

So I’ve felt a quiet kinship with Simone Weil ever since, and try to keep a copy of her Letter to a Priest nearby me at all times. She begins:

When I read the catechism of the Council of Trent, it seems as though I had nothing in common with the religion there set forth. When I read the New Testament, the mystics, the liturgy, when I watch the celebration of the mass, I feel with a sort of conviction that this faith is mine or, to be more precise, would be mine without the distance placed between it and me by my imperfection.

I love her for that — and I love, too, that her brother should make such a splendid Sembl move.

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I suppose I’d better post my reading of Wiles’ Proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem viewed as a Glass Bead Game as a follow up.

[ by Charles Cameron -- nota bene: numbers are my piano, words are my forte ]
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The New Scientist in its feature Charting Syria’s civil war http://syria.newscientistapps.com/index.html claims that it “crunched the numbers on violent events in Syria” and then says “the resulting view suggests that the violence has subsided in recent months”.

Jay Ulfelder in Challenges in Measuring Violent Conflict, Syria Edition at Dart Throwing Chimp suggests “That inference is almost certainly wrong” — and proceeds to say why. Here’s the broad strokes short form:

As Deborah Gerner and Phil Schrodt describe in a paper from the late 1990s, press coverage of a sustained and intense conflicts is often high when hostilities first break out but then declines steadily thereafter. That decline can happen because editors and readers get bored, burned out, or distracted. It can also happen because the conflict gets so intense that it becomes, in a sense, too dangerous to cover.

I’m interested in close reading versus sloppy writing, and from my POV the likelihood of that sort of almost axiomatic decline not being factored into New Scientist‘s conclusions slides in when they write that they “crunched the numbers on violent events in Syria”.

If instead they’d written that they’d “crunched the numbers on reports of violent events in Syria” — wouldn’t it have been a little harder to then write, “the resulting view suggests that the violence has subsided in recent months”?

Wouldn’t it have made more sense to write, “the resulting view suggests that the reports of violence have subsided in recent months”?

I’m sorry, but from where I sit it’s not the numbers, it’s the sloppy language that seems problematic.

[ by Charles Cameron -- a poet's rant against the hubris of scientists and the poverty of so much of what passes for art ]
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Gorgeous. And fascinating.

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I’d like to begin by saying beauty is not the same as prettiness any more than joy is the same as fun or truth than popular opinion. In fact I have an aphorism:

if you shoot for beauty, you’re liable to hit prettiness; if you want to achieve beauty, shoot for truth.

Okay? The beautiful can be grotesque, utterly normal, joyously peaceful, extremely violent, or simply gorgeous — and be beautiful in each case.

Having said that, I’d also like to say that the world, the universe in all it immense scope and scale and variety and possibility, isn’t “science” or “art” — we find science in exploring it one way, find art in exploring it another.

And when scientists want to impress, they often do it by choosing elements of beauty in what science has recorded of a universe that is neither science nor art but seamlessly filled to the brim with both — by appealing to our aesthetic taste, to the “art” side of our being, while claiming the result is science.

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Case in point:

The graphic above, from the I fucking love science photo timeline on FaceBook, which comes with the caption:

Caddisfly larvae build protective cases using materials found in their environment. Artist Hubert Duprat supplied them with gold leaf and precious stones. This is what they created.

Did you get that? It’s from a site that bills itself I fucking love science that specializes in presenting, how can I make this simple, nature’s art. It’s the recognition of beauty that makes this site so wonderful — and in this particular case, the work of Artist Hubert Duprat.

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I’ve been working with jewelry recently, and as you can see from this image of a Hematite “Tricubi” necklace by Bernd Wolf, the influence goes both ways.

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What is beauty? And why does science as an institution so often want to claim what properly belongs in the realm of art? Or is science, perhaps, an art or cluster of arts? I’m tired of these ceaseless wranglings between two supposedly opposing cultures.

Paul Dirac:

I think that there is a moral to this story, namely that it is more important to have beauty in one’s equations that to have them fit experiment.

As art, the jewel-like protective cases those caddisfly larvae make are simply beautiful. The fact that they make them is fascinating.

[ by Charles Cameron -- Christmas pudding UK circa 1950, math, banks, and moral authority ]
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As I recall, the plum pudding served in our family on Christmas day was not only rich in raisins, sultanas, currants and candied peel, it not only had brandy poured over it and a flame swiftly set to it, it was not only served with brandy butter…

It also had, somewhere within it, a silver coin — I understand these were originally related to coins of healing and the Royal Touch — and one of us, my sister and I, would be the one to find it in our slice. So equality of opportunity was important, both of us wanted to have an equal chance at winning the coveted prize.

Or perhaps I should say, equantity? Because believe me, the quality in each and every slice was just fine.

All this by way of saying that yes, I understand that quantity has its uses.

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In Recipe for Disaster: The Formula That Killed Wall Street a while back, Felix Salmon proposed the upper (and more colorful) of the two equations below, suggesting that it was the root cause of the financial failure of 2008:

Comes now Chris Arnade blogging on Scientific American for the defense, claiming that The Real—and Simple—Equation That Killed Wall Street was the lower of the two equations (the one in black on white).

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Arnade writes of Salmon’s Wired article:

It was not the first piece that made this type of argument, but it was the most aggressive. Since then it has been a common theme in the media that mathematics, especially obscure advanced mathematics, is largely responsible for the catastrophe that doomed the world to the last five years of recession and slow growth.

This theme plays on the fallacy that danger always comes from complexity. It’s a fabrication that obscures the real causes, that makes it easier to say, “Hey, it wasn’t my fault, I was blinded by science.”

The reality is much simpler and less sexy. Wall Street killed itself in a time-honored fashion: Cheap money, excessive borrowing, and greed. And yes, there is an equation one can point to and blame. This equation, however, requires nothing more than middle school algebra to understand and is taught to every new Wall Street employee. It is leveraged return.

What is leveraged return? It’s the return on assets using borrowed money.

I am depicted as the fellow with glasses and a squint, squeezed in between the two equations. When I recover from my discombobulation, I will push my glasses up high on my brow and say, Don’t ask me — I’m a Qualit!

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And now we Anglicans have a new Archbishop who, well, as the Guardian puts it, Archbishop of Canterbury accuses banks of hypocrisy over bonuses:

Two months ago HSBC was also fined a record £1.2bn over allegations of money laundering for Mexican drug barons. Regulators said HSBC had allowed at least $881m of drugs money through its accounts.

Taking evidence from HSBC’s two top bosses – its chief executive, Stuart Gulliver, and chairman, Douglas Flint – the archbishop said: “I’m increasingly baffled at the discussion we are having. What is it essentially about bankers that means they need skin in the game [bonuses]? We don’t give skin in the game to civil servants, to surgeons, to teachers.

“There’s a whole range of people who don’t have that. It seems to me that you are putting huge effort into a values-based organisation and yet at the end of the day, particularly for your most senior staff who are most important as regards setting values and culture, you seem to be saying the only way you can motivate them to any significant extent is with cash.”

The bankers, who said they wanted to turn HSBC into a bank of “courageous integrity”, insisted it was necessary to pay bonuses because they provided incentives that could be clawed back if mistakes were later uncovered.

Don’t you love it? Courageous integrity!

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As Rochefoucauld said:

Hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue.

It seems it is a small price to pay, quantitatively speaking — a rounding error. From a qualitative perspective however, it is a Faustian price — as Wikipedia (following Britannica) has it, it is:

a situation in which an ambitious person surrenders moral integrity in order to achieve power and success

Ooh — it’s a question of having or surrendering moral integrity about one’s own claim to integrity! A self-referential paradox if ever I saw one…

Christianity (since we’ve just been quoting an Archbishop) sets the matter sub specie aeternitatis in Mark 7.6:

He answered and said unto them, Well hath Esaias prophesied of you hypocrites, as it is written, This people honoureth me with their lips, but their heart is far from me.

A small price, or the ultimate? Quant? or Qualit? The choice is always ours.

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So you see why I’d rather be a Qualit than a Quant.

But even so, finding that silver coin in my Christmas pudding was pretty special, from a quantish point of view. The brandy butter, more qualitish IMO, was even better.

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Sources for header:

Qualit logo
Quant logo

Sources for SPECS:

Wired‘s equation
SciAm‘s equation

[ by Charles Cameron -- math, modeling and mapping, in that strange zone where beauty meets understanding ]
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The upper equation — Euler‘s — gets as tight and definitional as one can get, yet is profound in the way the greatest haiku are… while the metaphorical “equation” mentioned in the lower panel is a very rough model indeed of the intricate and constantly shifting forces at work in and on Pakistan.

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I’m interested in mapping these sorts of influences at a level of detail that the human mind can assimilate and comprehend — and the graphical news-map in the video below will give you an idea of what one approach to such a mapping would look like.

This particular example is drawn from a mapping of web-based news items related to President Obama over the course of 2009, but it should give you some idea of the constant flux of tensions and motion of “nodes” involved in tracking political issues, at home or abroad — the beginning is a bit slow, but from about the 23 second mark on is just amazing:

Now is that art, or technology — or a beginning of something fascinating that by its very nature melds both?

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Sources:

FB Ali, Interesting times in Pakistan on Sic Semper Tyrannis

Recorded Future Index video